Hi--I'm a beadweaver located in Panama City, FL. Here I'm trying to put down where my ideas are headed, and what I'm working on creatively. You can see more of my work at emiliepritchard.com

Thursday, January 29, 2015

Octahedron shapes.

I've been playing around with the different shapes I can get in octahedrons. I started thinking about how I don't get a firm shape using RAW with tube beads because a square isn't rigid the way a triangle is. But on the other hand right angles are just so "freindly" to work with. We're surrounded by them, and we know how they work. So I started imagining octahedrons (octs)that were more or less square in overall shape. I wanted the piece to be not too deep, i.e. not sticking up too far off the body (as lots of my pieces do). So with a relatively flat oct I could just use Pythagorus to figure out how long to make the "waist" beads--here the gold beads-- so that you'd have a right triangle, and that would make a square shaped oct. The cross-wise and length-wise tubes are 20mm long, so a 28mm gold tube would be about right. Actually, though, I decided to use 25mm cold tubes instead, so the octs aren't quite square, but zigzag a bit. Partly that was because I thought a bit of a zigzag was more interesting, and partly because I prefer using more or less stock lengths rather than cutting tubes just for a single design. If I use stock lengths (5, 10, 15, 20 and 25mm), I have more flexibility in the design. If I cut custom pieces ahead of time, I have to have it all figured out before I do it, and I like to sort of make it up as I go along, even if I have the general idea figured out at the start. Also there would be lots of times that I would cut lots of, say 28mm tubes and then discover that to get the right curve, I really needed them to be 27.5 or 29mm or whatever.
Here, when I got to the back and needed to make it curve, I had to use shorter tubes on the inside triangles than on the outside ones. The ideal length for the inside tubes would have been around 18mm, so I just alternated between 15mm tubes in 1 oct and 20mm ones in the next. One of these days I'd like to skip the curve and do a piece that would look sort of like a tic-tac-toe grid.

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